Transcript The American Revolution - White Plains Public Schools

A War for Independence
 In
Europe, the war was known as the
Seven Years’ War
 In North America, it was known as the
French and Indian War
 The Treaty of Paris ended the war in
1763
 The French ceded territory to Britain
in North America and elsewhere
 In addition, the British also secured
Canada
 And the thirteen colonies seemed safe
from any threat posed from the French
and their native American allies
 After
the war, the British wanted the
American colonies to contribute more
to the cost of their own defense
 And some successful merchants in the
colonies wanted to break free of
controls imposed by the British
 Of course, there were also radical
politicians and propagandists who
wanted a complete break with Britain
when many of their countrymen still
hoped that it might be avoided
 There
was a growing sense of
patriotism and national identity
 There was increased resentment of
Great Britain’s economic mastery over
the colonies
 In particular, many colonists,
especially in light of the fact that
they lacked representation in the
British Parliament, resented the taxes
Britain levied to pay for the army it
maintained in North America
 Economic
freedom from Britain
would also allow American
merchants to become wealthier,
due to free trade and the new
spirit of capitalism
 And don’t forget, the philosophers
of the Enlightenment…their ideas
encouraged the pursuit of liberty
 Enlightenment thinkers such as
John Locke, Baron Charles de
Montesquieu, Voltaire, and others
shaped the government that
eventually developed after this
war for independence
 Yet
the descent into armed conflict between
patriot (anti-British) and loyalist (pro-British)
sympathizers was gradual
 Events like the Boston 'Massacre' of 1770,
when British troops fired on a mob that had
attacked a British sentry outside Boston's
State House, and the Boston 'tea-party' of
1773, when British-taxed tea was thrown into
the harbour, marked the downward steps
 Less
obvious was the take-over of the
colonial militias - which had initially been
formed to provide local defence against the
French and the Native Americans - by officers
in sympathy with American patriots/rebels,
rather than by those in sympathy with proBritish loyalists/Tories
 As all these elements of conflict came into
play, the British commander in chief in North
America was Lieutenant General Thomas
Gage
 In
April 1775, Gage sent a small
force to seize patriot militia
weapons and gunpowder at
Concord, not far from Boston, but
his soldiers became involved in a
brief fire fight on Lexington Green
on their way there
 At first, the poorly trained and
poorly armed American forces, led
by George Washington, struggled
against the professional armies of
Britain
 By 1777, however, the tide was
turning
 In
mid-1775, patriot representatives of the
13 colonies of America, meeting in
Philadelphia as the Continental Congress, had
appointed George Washington, a well-to-do
Virginia landowner, as commander in chief of
its military forces
 Washington, who thought militias
fundamentally unreliable, set about raising a
regular force, the Continental Army, and as
the initial skirmishes between the patriots on
the one hand and the British and their
loyalist supporters on the other turned into a
full-scale war, both sides were to use a
mixture of regular troops, militias and other
irregulars
 Washington
could also do nothing to deny the
enormous advantage that command of the sea
conferred on the British
 In the summer of 1776 General Howe, his army
of 30,000 men carried in ships commanded by
his brother Richard, landed near New York and
duly captured the city, inflicting several sharp
defeats on the patriots
 Washington,
fearing that his cause would
inevitably collapse as short-term enlistment
into the Continental Army expired, launched
a risky attack on the little town of Trenton,
held by a brigade of Hessians (German troops
in British service) on Boxing Day 1776
 He won this battle, and although the victory
was small in tactical terms, it had a wider
strategic impact, showing that the patriots
were still in the fight
 In
1777, Howe took Philadelphia for the
British
 But an ill-judged British attempt to invade
from Canada, thrusting down the Hudson
Valley towards New York and cutting off
rebellious New England, went badly wrong,
and Lieutenant General John Burgoyne was
forced to surrender with his entire army at
Saratoga in October
 Defeat
at Saratoga was not necessarily a
military cataclysm for the British, but it
encouraged the French, anxious to obtain
revenge for the humiliations of the Seven
Years War, to go beyond the covert support
they had offered the patriots thus far, and
join the war
 Spain and Holland were to follow suit, and
in 1780 a wider League of Armed
Neutrality was formed, to resist British
attempts to stop and search merchant
shipping
 Saratoga
did not improve Washington's
position instantly, however, and his army
spent a miserable winter at Valley Forge
 In the New York area there had been no
developments of real military significance
 However, the ambitious Major General
Benedict Arnold, one of the patriot heroes of
Saratoga, had become embittered, and
entered into secret negotiations with British
General Clinton to betray the fort at West
Point on the Hudson
 The scheme failed at the last moment and
Arnold escaped to enter British service:
Major John André, Clinton's adjutant-general,
was captured in civilian clothes carrying
letters to Arnold, and Washington had him
hanged
 In
the spring of 1781 the picture changed
 Admiral de Grasse, commanding the French
fleet in the West Indies, made a bold attempt to
secure control of the sea off the Chesapeake
Bay
 Immediately Washington heard what was afoot,
he moved south with the bulk of his army and
Rochambeau's Frenchmen
 The British could not prevent de Grasse from
entering the Chesapeake Bay, and when they
brought him to battle in early September the
result was a tactical draw but a strategic victory
for the French
 They
still controlled the bay, and Cornwallis
was still trapped in Yorktown
 Another French squadron brought in heavy
guns from Rhode Island, and the French and
Americans mounted a formal siege against
the outnumbered and ill-provisioned British
General Cornwallis
 Although Clinton and the admirals mounted a
relief expedition, it arrived too late:
Cornwallis had surrendered
 Although
the war was not formally ended until
the Treaty of Paris in 1783, it was clear after
Yorktown that the British, with their world-wide
preoccupations, no longer had any realistic
chance of winning
 The
patriots had always been likely to win,
provided they struggled on and avoided outright
defeat
 It is unlikely that George Washington would
much like being compared with General Vo
Nguyen Giap, who commanded the North
Vietnamese army in the Vietnam war
 But both shared the same recognition that a
militarily-superior opponent with worldwide
preoccupations can be beaten by an opponent
who avoids outright defeat and remains in the
field
 It is an old truth, and 21st-century strategists,
whatever their political differences, should be
well aware of it
 Although
some colonists, nicknamed “Tories,”
remained loyal to the British, popular support
for the revolution was high
 Another social factor that helped the Americans
was that most members of all classes – lower,
middle, and upper – united behind the
independence movement
 And the Americans were fighting on their home
territory
 Not
only did European freedom fighters with
military experience arrive to train American
troops, the Americans also used unconventional
tactics and guerrilla warfare to counter the
British soldiers’ training and experience
 The British were also fighting far from home, at
the end of extremely long supply lines
 And of course, after America’s victory at
Saratoga in late 1777, France, Britain’s mortal
enemy, began to lend military and naval
assistance to the American colonists
 The assistance of the French fleet against the
Royal Navy, Britain’s chief strength, was
particularly useful to the Americans
 After
the war, there was much disagreement
over how closely bound together the thirteen
colonies would be
 Also, who should have power?
 Should the government be elected?
 And if so, who should be allowed to vote?
 These questions and others were decided at the
Constitutional Convention of 1787
 By 1789, the United States Constitution had
been written and accepted by all thirteen states
 The
system that resulted was a democratic
republic, in which a federal government shared
powers with governments in each state
 To prevent a dictatorship, power at the federal
level was shared among three branches:
executive (president), legislative (Congress),
and judicial (Supreme Court)
 State governments, as well as the president and
members of Congress, were to be elected
 It
should be noted, however, that “democracy”
in this case – as in all cases before the twentieth
century – was by no means all-inclusive
 Women and Native Americans could not vote
 Men who failed to fulfill certain property
requirements could not vote
 Moreover, the U.S. Constitution did not outlaw
slavery
 Yet
despite its initial flaws, the U.S.
Constitution has remained one of the most
successful political documents in world history
 It is also the product and cause of a great deal
of intellectual and philosophical exchange
 Most of the Constitution’s general ideals, and
many of the specific principles, came from
England and France
 From
John Locke, the ideas of natural rights
or the right to life, liberty, and property
were incorporated into the Constitution
 From Montesquieu, the idea of separation of
powers came
 From Voltaire, the principle of religious
freedom and freedom of speech were
incorporated
 And Rousseau contributed the idea of the
social contract
 In
turn, the Constitution (along with
the Declaration of Independence
that the colonists wrote in 1776) had
an enormous impact on the Atlantic
revolutions that followed in the
1780s, 1790s, and early 1800s
 France’s Declaration of the Rights of
Man and the Citizen drew heavily
upon America’s Declaration of
Independence and Constitution
 The
failed Dutch rebellion of the
1780s did likewise
 In the early nineteenth century,
the revolutionaries of Latin
America did their best to adapt
the Americans’ political methods
and ideals
 Therefore, the American
Revolution, and the political
documents at the heart of it, had
a tremendous impact on the rest
of the world
 The
Monroe Doctrine (1823)
-the U.S. government warned the nations
of Europe against intervening in the
Western Hemisphere’s political affairs
-It was the first step in the United States’
creation of a sphere of influence in the
Americas
-By the end of the 1800s, especially after
the Spanish-American War (1898), the
United States’ economic and political
influence over Latin America was
considerable
 U.S.A.
Territorial Expansion
-The rapid and massive growth of the United
States, from a collection of small colonies on
North America’s east coast to a vast land
sprawling from Atlantic to Pacific, greatly
altered the balance of world power
-This growth began with the Louisiana
Purchase of 1803 and continued with the
Mexican-American War (1846-1848), along
with other events
-The United States became a huge nation,
incredibly rich in natural resources
 America’s
reputation as a land of freedom
and economic opportunity drew millions of
immigrants from Europe and Asia during the
1800s
 Approximately one million Irish immigrants
came to the United States during the Irish
Potato Famine of the 1800s
 The impact of immigration has had a
tremendous demographic effect on the
geographical balance of world population